City hall on the defensive in first day of open sessions

René Bruemmer, GAZETTE Civic affairs reporter12.06.2012

City officials Marc Blanchet, left, Guy Hébert and Alain Bond speak at city hall on Wednesday. Bond, the city comptroller, said his office has created an advisory body that city employees and officials can contact anonymously to ensure ethical standards are met.

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In a groundbreaking move meant to illuminate how the city conducts its affairs and increase public confidence, Montreal’s executive committee met in public Wednesday — and promptly found itself fending off allegations that the city’s new administration has scrapped programs and measures meant to combat corruption and collusion.

In the past, the city’s main decision-making body, composed of roughly a dozen councillors, adopted billions of dollars in contracts and set public policy in private, a rarity among North American city councils. Agendas of the meetings were not distributed until after the meetings, and omitted information.

On Wednesday, the meeting was broadcast over closed-circuit television at city hall, open to the public but watched by only a handful of journalists, and via the Internet. City officials didn’t yet have numbers on how many citizens logged on to watch. The agenda for the meeting — all 372 pages of it, with the explanation for all resolutions included, save those omitted for confidentiality reasons — was available on the city’s website beforehand.

“I’ve always said that if city council is taking good positions, we should be willing to do it publicly,” said Mayor Michael Applebaum, who pledged to make the meetings open to the public when he ran for the position of interim mayor in November.

In a form of City Council 101 for the viewing public and the new members of the executive committee, Wednesday’s morning session featured presentations from heads of the various city departments, including finance, waterworks, security and infrastructure, on their major challenges and plans for 2013.

At the start, however, city manager Guy Hébert was forced to kick off the meeting with assurances the city’s corruption oversight measures are still operating. This was in reaction to a La Presse report saying several regulations instituted in the wake of the water-meter contract and Faubourg Contrecoeur land deal scandals in 2009 had been scrapped. Witnesses at the Charbonneau Commission have alleged the city was unable to combat a widespread system of corruption and collusion orchestrated by contractors bidding on municipal contracts, aided by fraudulent city officials. Witnesses also testified the corruption stopped in 2009 once the issue was publicized and police and the city cracked down.

Sources within the civil service accused Hébert of erasing strict regulations regarding the awarding of contracts in order to speed up the process, La Presse reported.

“It’s completely false,” he said. “Yes, we want to move projects along, but we are not in the process of dismantling regulation measures in place since 2009,” Hébert said at a news conference. “On the contrary, we’re making them better. These changes to the system were made to eliminate certain administrative heaviness.”

Hébert claimed overly stringent regulations were bogging down the process, with the result that in 2011 only 38 per cent of projects scheduled under the city’s capital works program were underway, whereas in 2012 the number spiked to 70 per cent. Hébert has been city manager since January, and said he prefers fewer committees, less bureaucracy and getting things done.

The comptroller’s office has created an advisory body that city employees and officials can contact anonymously to ensure ethical standards are met, city comptroller Alain Bond said. And it has instituted a new spot-check team of two engineers that paid surprise visits to 30 work sites a total of 200 times last summer, to ensure work was performed to specifications and on budget.

Hébert said city hall also has a team of independent economists in the construction field to make hypothetical bids to see whether they coincide with those provided by contractors.

Hébert was forced to admit, however, that this innovation was created in 2004 by one of his predecessors.

Louise Harel, leader of opposition party Vision Montreal, said she believes the current administration is operating in good faith, but must prove it to the public. “The population lacks conviction that the cleanup has been completed, and the big question is how to complete it. That’s what we are working on now.”

However, the elimination of an oversight committee tasked with checking the close to $100 million in contracts city councillors approve each month is “troubling,” Harel said. Vision Montreal will submit a motion next week asking the city’s general auditor to investigate the numerous and expensive computer and technology contracts awarded by the city.

The afternoon session of the executive committee meeting, chaired by councillor Laurent Blanchard, formerly of Vision Montreal and now sitting as an independent, was dedicated to the normal business of approving motions and contracts, and was marked by civil discourse. Most resolutions passed quickly.

The city of Montreal’s executive committee meets every Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. Members of the public can view the meetings at city hall, 275 Notre Dame St. E., where sessions will be shown on screen in Room RC-110. Meetings are also streamed on the city’s website, ville.montreal.qc.ca.

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